Must have Office 365 Business Premium, Business Essentials, or Enterprise account. No @ mentions, filtering tools, search bar, timer, or swimlanes.

Bottom Line

Microsoft Planner is a lightweight kanban-style collaboration tool. While it supports teamwork to a degree, it's missing important functionality found in competing apps.

Microsoft Planner is designed to be a place where team members collaboratively manage and discuss work, using the kanban method. To get Planner, you have to subscribe to an Office 365 business grade account. Because of this requirement, it's highly unlikely that anyone who isn't already a subscriber would choose to use it. But if you have it and use other Microsoft apps, Planner easily links up with the rest of your work, whether that's information databases, email, or your calendar.

Similar Products

Planner is an okay service, but not an excellent one. The key benefits to using it have to do with the fact that it integrates easily with other Office 365 apps. On paper, that integration sounds great. In practice, it's underwhelming. You can get a similar experience or better by connecting any of the best kanban apps—such as Editors' Choice Asana, or another highly rated app like Volerro, Wrike, or Leankit—to your email, cloud storage, note-taking app, and so forth.

Pricing and Plans

As mentioned, to get Microsoft Planner, you have to have a business grade Microsoft Office 365 account. The ones that include Planner are Business Essentials, Business Premium (but not the one simply called Business), and enterprise accounts. Business Essentials costs $6 per person per month, with a discount if you pay annually. Business Premium costs $15 per person per month, also with a discount for paying annually. Keep in mind that those accounts include a whole host of other apps and services: OneDrive for Business, Exchange, Sharepoint, Skype for Business, Microsoft Teams, and in the case of the Premium account, all the core Microsoft Office apps, too. In terms of value, you really do get a lot for the price.

That said, there are standalone kanban-style collaboration tools that you can buy and start using immediately, regardless of whether you have a Microsoft account set up, and they sell for a variety of prices.

KanbanFlow is one of the least expensive options. A paid Premium plan costs $5 per person per month, or if you prefer to pay annually, $54 per person per year. Volerro also has a low price, at just $7.99 per person per month for its Business Teams account. Trello, one of the most popular kanban apps, charges $119.88 per person per year, equivalent to $9.99 per person per month. Editors' Choice Asana cost $11.99 per person per month, or $119.88 per person if you pay annually.

On the high end of the price range are LeanKit and Zenkit. Leankit charges anywhere from $228 per person per year to $588 per person per year, equivalent to $19 and $49 per person per month, respectively. Zenkit costs $348 per person per year, equivalent to $29 per person per month.

Many of these apps also have a free tier of service that you can use with some limitations, although Microsoft Planner does not.

Planner as Kanban

Planner runs as a web app, although there are also downloadable apps for Windows, iOS, and Android.

If you're unfamiliar with kanban, a classic example that helps explain how kanban works is to have columns labeled To Do, Doing, and Done. Once these columns are set up, you put cards into them. Imagine sticky notes arranged into columns on a Board. Each card or sticky note has a task written on it. The cards start in the To Do column. People have tasks assigned to them. When the assignee starts doing the task, she moves the card to the Doing column. As she works on the task, she might add comments to the sticky note about her progress. Her boss might also write comments on the task card, too. When the task is completed, the assignee moves the card to the Done column.

You don't need to stick to the To Do, Doing, Done arrangement. Kanban apps, Planner included, lets you name the columns however you like. One note, however: In Planner, columns are called "buckets."

In Planner, each card can have a variety of detail added to it, such as a title (usually the task name), description, assignee, due date, file attachments, comments from other collaborators, a checklist, and a start date. Every card in Planner also has a dropdown selection for three stages: Not Started (the default), In Progress, and Completed. When as task is finished, you choose the Completed option, or you can simply hit a checkbox instead. Completed cards disappear from view, unless you choose to show them from an option at the very bottom of each column.

I explain this setup in great detail because something unexpected happened when I tested the app. As I moved completed cards from one bucket/column to another, they reverted to the status Not Started. In my scenario, I named the last column on the right Completed, and I wanted to save all the completed tasks there for review. But as I said, when I dragged a card from a different column into that one, the card suddenly marked itself as Not Started. If I then checked the box to mark it as complete once again, it disappeared from view altogether. At the bottom of the column I found something I could click to show me completed tasks. When I clicked to enable that option, my cards reappeared, grayed out and crossed off, as I had initially hoped and expected. Now when I drag completed cards into that bucket, they remain in the Completed status only if I place them at the very bottom of the column among the other Completed items.

The way it works, there's too much room for error. It's a big deal for a task to go from Completed to Not Started just because you drag it to the wrong part of the correct coulmn. That kind of false information can throw a whole team off. Work that has been done will show up in reports as being not done and possibly also overdue.

Many other aspects of Microsoft Planner work as expected, and some work better than expected. For example, when you open a card to see its full details and add to them, there are checkboxes asking if you want to include the piece of information in the Board view of the card. When I upload image files to cards, I like to see those images, as they are usually good visual reminders of the content of the card, though other people might prefer to hide them to save screen space. It's nice to have the option. In Trello and a few other kanban apps, you typically don't have an option to include or exclude details from appearing on the card in Board view. I've even run into one app, KanbanFlow, that didn't show images attached to cards in the Board view at all.

Another helpful feature, the Charts view, shows a summary of tasks that are Not Started, In Progress, Overdue, and Complete. This view provides a breakdown of tasks assigned to each team member as well and their status.

Quirks and What's Missing

Planner has more than a few quirks. Sometimes it took me several minutes to figure out how to perform very simple actions, such as adding a Board to my list of favorites. In other apps it takes little more than clicking on a star at the top of the page, whereas in Planner there was no such star; a list of favorites wasn't in the Settings (moreover, the Settings option takes you to settings for Office 365, not Planner); and I couldn't do it by dragging the project icon from its current location to the favorites list, as drag and drop isn't supported in the menu bar. Eventually I found an "Add To/Remove From Favorites" option at the bottom of a menu that opens from an ellipsis. Most of the other selections in this list take you to another Office app, so it still doesn't make sense to me why Add To/Remove From Favorites is among those choices.

There's no search bar, an egregious omission. If you need a particular task card, the only way to find out is to scroll through your Board and hunt. I was also surprised to not find any filtering tools. A common example of a filtering tool is one that shows all tasks that are overdue, or all tasks with a certain tag or label, or all tasks assigned to a certain person or department—but still laid out on the kanban Board as you've arranged it.

In Planner, the closest you get to filtering tools are one-click options to view all tasks by assignee or by state of progress. Even those aren't true filtering tools, though. In both cases, when Planner shows you the results, the column headers change. In other words, if you had buckets for Order Received, Order Processing, Order Fulfilled, Order Shipped, those all disappear and are replaced with either Planner's three states of progress (Not Started, In Progress, Completed) or the names of assignees. Although you can see all tasks assigned to Claire, Mark, and Yvonne, you lose the context of your Board arrangement.

Another disappointment is that there are no @ mentions in Planner. Asana, Trello, Wrike, and other kanban apps have them. Using an @ symbol before someone's name means you want to alert that person to your comments or question. Many collaboration apps use them, not just kanban apps. The person you mention receives a notification, usually with a link that takes them right to the applicable comment. Planner should really have them. Otherwise, collaborators may end up reverting to email to discuss the work, and that seems to run counter to the whole point of a collaboration app.

You won't find a timer in Planner either, although Wrike and KanbanFlow have them. You also don't get swimlanes, which is to say, a view of the board in which the horizontal line is also given a value the same way the column header is. A typical swimlane view in a kaban app might filter rows by assignee or department responsible. Zenkit, KanbanFlow, Breeze.pm, and other apps have them.

Integrations

Planner's effortless integration with other Office apps is a real advantage, but it's also one that shouldn't be oversold. It's true that you can very easily pull files from OneDrive to attach to cards, or leverage SharePoint in a similar fashion, but some those capabilities are really not much different from connecting Asana to Google Drive or Dropbox, or whatever online storage provider you use.

Most kanban apps integrate with cloud storage, and they don't take much setup other than authenticating them. Other integrations are often possible with commonly used tools, such as email and calendars. For more obscure apps, or for specific automations between apps you integrate, you can often turn to Zapier for help. Zapier is a service that creates integrations and automations between online services and apps for you, without requiring you to have any programming skills. Trello, Asana, Wrike, and several other kanban apps are supported by Zapier. Microsoft Planner isn't in the Zapier network.

Other integration capabilities in Planner were less impressive when I actually put them to the test. For example, I had hoped that clicking a button labeled Conversation would open a discussion forum for that Board, with all the members automatically invited. Instead, I was whisked into Microsoft Outlook, where my options were to draft a new email to everyone in the group, add content for everyone to see via SharePoint, upload files to share via email, or connect other apps. Collaboration apps risk losing their appeal if they send you back to email or whatever old tools had been not meeting your collaboration needs in the first place.

Limited Use

For light collaboration and work-management, Planner gets the job done, but it's lacking in several areas. It's missing a few things that I'd consider fundamental, such as a search bar, filters, and notifications for @ mentions, as well as some features I'd only expect in advanced versions of kanban tools, like a task timer and swimlanes. If you're in need of a powerful kanban app, I'd recommend instead Editors' Choice Asana, or the other top rated apps, Wrike, Volerro, and Leankit. If you already have an Office 365 account that includes access to Planner, and you've not yet decided whether you even need a kanban app for collaboration, you might give it a go, but only if the work you need to manage is fairly light.

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About the Author

Jill Duffy is a contributing editor, specializing in productivity apps and software, as well as technologies for health and fitness. She writes the weekly Get Organized column, with tips on how to lead a better digital life. Her first book, Get Organized: How to Clean Up Your Messy Digital Life is available for Kindle, iPad, and other digital forma... See Full Bio

Microsoft Planner

Microsoft Planner

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